Talking Rain's Klock: Sparkling Ice's Exponential Growth(Audio)

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From the Bloomberg News Room, I'm Oliver Rennick, Charlie, and we thank you and again recapping stock slore SMP five dred index down twelve a drop of six tenths of one. I'm Charlie Palatin. That's a Bloomberg business flash. You're listening to taking Stock with Kathleen Hay and Pim Fox on Bloomberg Radio. The beverage shelf is very, very crowded, from some very sweet ones like Coca Cola and Pepsi to a whole host of new, sparkling waters of all kinds.

So how do you build your business in an environment like this? Well, Kevin Clark has done it pretty successfully so far. He's president and CEO of Talking Rain Beverage Company, and he's based out in the Seattle area. Kevin, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. So Talking Rain I've had your sodas. What do you say? I mean, I think a lot of people to say, listen, man, you know you get a club so that doesn't have sugar, you put some fruit flavor in there, They're all the same.

What do you say makes talking rain different? Well, I think one of the things that we work very hard on is that everything from the color to the smell to the flavor that's consistent with whatever the name of the beverage is. And that is something that is very difficult to do, and that's why it probably takes us about two years just to develop a flavor, and something we spend on awful lot of time on. Ultimately, consumers want taste, and that's one thing we think we we

master very well. Kevin, just taking a look at some research here, the non alcoholic beverage industry is a proxyly a hundred and eighty billion dollars in the United States. About thirty five billion of that is up for grabs for small brands such as yourself. Explain how you go head to head against larger brands such as Coca Cola, such as those items from PepsiCo. How do you get on the shelf and what does that do for your strategy. Well, one of the things we were fortunate we saw some

white space. The sparkling water category was really being ignored. Well we jumped into it. Uh. The two big brands in this country did not have products in that space. And so one of things that helps certainly jump try don't try and go head to head too early, and so we were able to get in there and grow very rapidly, uh to get shelf space UH in an area that was really pretty much ignored. Now that we're larger, in the meantime, we've built a business where we have distributors,

we have business intelligence teams, marketing teams. UM. We've now built the foundation of a company that's there to supported everything from category management to you know, some true good financing type of opportunities. So now we're able to operate as a beverage company. And now that we're in that mode and retailers are used to us, uh, it certainly gives us the opportunity. Now staying to to toe, how

did you get into this business? Well, the company actually was founded back in uh are excuse me, in seven and our current owners, uh Don Klein and Larry Headner came in originally as uh kind of angel investors. And so there was a sparkling water business actually it's called Talking Rain today and UM was just a very entrepreneurial company and it was they saw things like Clearly Canadian and some other sparkling brands that maybe we're earlier on

and I want to do similar things. But we really didn't make a push nationally until two thousand ten, Kevin, And why din't you could tell us the story how you got into a market like Ireland and what the reaction was, because I know you've told me the story previously, the reaction from many of the retailers and the consumers about getting into that market. Yeah, we actually went over there and asked the retailers if they'd be interested in the brand and were stunned at the reception that we

got from the retailers. And then in April we started servicing the market and we're just blown away with how fast and what the takeup was. And what we discovered over in Ireland, for instance, is it's a very heavily soda dominated market. You certainly don't see the huge breadth of variety, uh, that you have in the US. I said, we've seen that they've been a little bit more aggressive over there on sugar taxes and and tackling some of

those things. So the consumers over there didn't have much choice, and but it looks like they were ready, uh for a new brand to come over there to start giving them opportunity to get away from sugar. Well, I'm on your bandwagon. You have been for many years, Kevin clock. So this is a popular product in my household. How

do you grow? What's next? Well, we've still you know, we've gotten very large and the grocery and mass in the United States, but there's plenty of opportunities still inconvenience. Most of the time, you should be about thirty of your business should be in convenience, and we're eight percent right now food services for instance, schools. We're one of the products that actually can be sold at schools, which

is a great foundation for us. And we'll be in schools and forty six of the fifty states by this fall. So we've got plenty of play of room for our base brand to grow and plus international now though, as we have gotten a beverage company UH put together, we're now starting to expand into adding UH potentially other brands will come into the fold and certainly will continue to grow line extensions of Sparkling Ice, so lots of room

to grow still. Kevin described the essential quality of the packaging, particularly when it comes to the beverage industry. Well, and you know, people forget, I think that consumers carry around the bottles in their hands, and so the product beverages tend to be more of a badge to somebody. So it's it's what they want to be seen, and so

that's that's important. So it's gonna be something people are willing to be seen with in our particular case, by having the ability to see the liquid and the vibrancy in terms of how it comes out, it looks refreshing. So if you can, you know, you can make the package really display who you are so the consumer doesn't have to think about it. And in a particular case, you know, we are zero calories, and so the consumer likes holding something that's then it kind of reminds them

of being zero cowers. Beg your pardon, Kevin, go ahead, alright to say the packaging is extremely important and conveying the message of your brand. All right, thanks for conveying your message. Kevin Clark is the president and the chief executive of Talking Rain Beverage, a company. The product is Sparkling Ice. They're based in Seattle. You can of course follow them on Twitter at Sparkling Ice and Talking Rain.

You're listening to Taking Stock on Bloomberg Radio. The Apple World Developers Conference has unveiled software that will allow its voice activated personal assistance Sirie, to even order pizza. We're going to talk about that coming up on Boomberg Radio.